SEVEN AUSTRALIAN POETS
Ron Pretty interviewed by John Kinsella
[Above] Photo of Ron Pretty by Chris Verheyden, 1998.
JK: When and where did you start writing poetry? Who were some of your early influences?
RP: I dabbled as a child and a teenager, the first piece I can remember publishing was in the school magazine when I was in Year 7. When I went to Sydney University I fell in love with W B Yeats and wrote bad imitations of him for years. But I wasn’t writing seriously until, in 1969, I went to Greece for a year. I spoke no Greek when I went there, and there were no English speakers in Serrai, the town in Greek Macedonia I was based in. As a result, I wrote endlessly in the course of that year, and began to take my writing seriously. I also discovered Seferis, Cavafy, Theodorakis (his Matthausen song cycle stays with me), Kazantzakis and co. Living in Greece under the dictator, Theodopoulos made one very aware that writing is also a political act.
JK: How has moving across cultures and national divides affected your craft? Affected the way you view your surroundings and translate them into verse?
RP: My maternal grandfather was Russian. The year in Greece was seminal in many ways. It opened me to European literature as a whole. Returning form Greece, I stumbled across Brathwaite’s Rites, as well as writers like Borges and Bessie Head. Before I transferred to the then School of Creative Arts, I worked in sociolinguistics and multicultural education generally. All of these things, I guess, fed my interest in European and “world” literature at a time when many Australian poets were looking more to US poets. Perhaps as a result, I’ve always been interested in the emotional and political content in poetry, and how to handle them. I haven’t always avoided sentimentality in my own poetry; on the other hand, though I admire the experiments of the language poets, I’ve seldom tried to emulate them.
JK: Do you consider yourself a poet of "place" or "places"?
RP: I’ve lived most of my life around southern Sydney and the Illawarra, but I’ve written maybe half a dozen poems that have arisen directly from this area, more have come from my year in Greece. But even then, I think it’s the people who live in the place, rather than the place as such, that I write about. Part of what we are depends on where we are and where we’ve been, but only a part. I’m fascinated by the Hay Plain, but I’m even more fascinated by the men who walked across it during the Great Depression.
JK: Should all poetry have some kind of emotional register?
RP: Poetry without an emotional content is a desiccated thing, experiment, practice, language play for its own sake, what Patrick White referred to as “the practice of mere skill, those weightless wet dreams of art”.
JK: Are there 'traditions' of non-indigenous love poetries in Australia?
RP: I find this an odd question, and oddly revealing. I suppose most people would say that there is a tradition of landscape poetry in Australia, but not one of love poetry; but does that mean that more Australian poets write about landscape than about love? I don’t think it does, nor do I think that is the case. What it does mean, I think, is that Australian critics have been more interested in landscape poetry than in love poetry, that that has been the oeuvre of the poets they’ve tended to see as “important”. I suspect there’s a gender issue buried in there ...
JK: You have a tight control of imagery and the rhetorical gesture in the poem - that is, you frame your observations with precise expression. How do you perceive the relationship between persona and subject? Between the seen and how it is expressed?
RP: I think most of my poems deal with imagined lives; not so much putting myself in other people’s shoes; more trying to find a point of contact between us, between my way of seeing the world and theirs. Not often are they people I’m close to; sometimes they are people I’ve met; more often they are composites or totally imagined. What I hope for then, of course, is that the language imagery and structures of the poem will reflect their way of seeing the world, rather than my own; but that can be only partial at best.
JK: You interviewed Craig Raine for Scarp some years ago. Has Martian poetry influenced your own?
RP: Not a lot. I admire the fertility of image-making, the lightness of touch, the scope for irony without particularly wanting to go down that path myself. I especially admire the playfulness. Peter Kirkpatrick is surely right when he says that Australian poets as a whole are a fairly dour lot (and I do include myself in this) and need more humour, more playfulness, a more assured lightness of touch.
JK: Have you had an interest in Language poetry? Do you see a separate tradition of experimentalism in Australian verse?
RP: No, I don’t think there’s a separate tradition, though some poets work more in this area than others. I think like most poets I play with sound in poetry, experiment with visual effects and with form and language and line breaks. Occasionally something interesting comes from it, but mostly what I hope for is that some of it will rub off in other poems I write. I think sometimes poets, like artists and composers, mistake these experiments for the real thing. Nobody ever wrote too much, but sometimes poets publish too much or try to.
JK: Do you find ethical issues intrusive if expressed "poetically"? Should such discussions/arguments be on the level of suggestion and implication?
RP: Why are ethical issues any more intrusive than philosophical or sexual or military or botanical issues? What matters is the way it is handled in the poem. Problems arise when the poet lectures the reader on any of these topics: a poem is a different kind of beast from a lecture or an essay or a sermon. Yeats’ dictum is a useful one here - that argument with others produces rhetoric, while poetry comes from argument with the self. What the poet needs to do is create a situation in the poem that engages the imagination of its readers, so that they recognise for themselves the ethical (or political or scientific) issues involved. Only by engaging the readers’ imagination and sympathies, perhaps by showing them aspects of the situation they hadn’t previously considered, will the poem make an impact. Unless, that is, it is preaching to the converted, which is all many religious or ethical or political poems seek to do.
JK: What is your view of the 'concept' book? Is this something you're moving towards as a poet? You have certainly been supportive of such approaches in your publishing program.
RP: I remember Rodney Hall’s Black Bagatelles with a good deal of admiration, and, as you say, we have published a number of them, though it’s not always easy to decide whether a given book fits the category. More to the point, I have tried, in the Five Islands Press publishing program, to remain open to a wide variety of kinds of poetry. If I haven’t yet published a book of surrealist poetry or bush ballads or visual poetry or…it’s because I haven’t yet been sent a manuscript in these areas that I’ve been sufficiently convinced by. My attitude to the ‘concept’ book is no different, but it’s not something that I have set out to do in my own writing.
My attitude to all these things, I am afraid, is rather pragmatic. When a manuscript comes in, I don’t ask what label to put on it, or where it fits theoretically. The first question I ask is what it has to offer its readers that’s new, or interesting, or compelling, what insights it offers to its readers about their world. Does it engage their imagination and their sympathies as well as their intellect? Different books, of course, have different readers, so part of my task is to try to identify who might be the readers for this book to decide whether there’s a potential audience large enough to make it viable, and to decide if this book is likely to please and/or satisfy that potential audience.
JK: Could you talk a little about the history of Five Islands Press? Its reasons for coming into existence, how the program has developed, its vision for the future. I am particularly interested in your landmark New Poets Series. Will the press actively promote indigenous work? Does it have a 'multi-cultural' outlook?
RP: In 1983, I had taken over the editing of SCARP: New Arts & Writings when I set up the Writing Strand in the (then) School of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong. We also began running readings and workshop programs both within the writing strand and outside it. I quickly became aware of how many active writers there were in the Illawarra, how much demand there was for publication beyond what SCARP could satisfy.
So the Press was set up in 1986 as a co-operative by a group of Illawarra writers. It began in response to the perennial problem of finding publishers for our work. In the beginning, we published prose as well as poetry. We agreed that we would publish one book by each of the eight members of the co-operative, which we did over a period of three years. Before the end of the cycle, word had got around that there was a new publisher on the scene, and manuscripts began to arrive. So after the co-operative published its final title, three of us, Rob Hood, Deb Westbury and I, decided to continue as a partnership called Five Islands Press Associates. Walter Tonetto’s Earth Against Heaven: A Tiannamen Square Anthology was the first title we did, but others quickly followed. By about 1995 Rob and Deb had largely dropped out, Rob to continue his interest in fiction publishing. FIP has continued as a one person operation since then, becoming a Proprietary Limited company in 2000.
The New Poets' Program was born in the early nineties as the result of a trip John Scott and I took to Canberra to lobby (unsuccessfully) for a federally funded writers’ centre in Wollongong. (We were more successful later, working through the NSW State Ministry for the Arts). On the way back, discussing the problem of first publication for promising new writers, we worked out the model that we have kept to ever since. We called it “New” poets, but that’s a misnomer. Many of the poets we have gone on to publish in that Program have been writing and publishing successfully for many years; their ages have ranged from early twenties to more than 60. The concept, though, is a simple one: all poets who have published at least eight poems in magazines are eligible to submit a manuscript, and we select six for publication from those submitted each year. Over the years the number of manuscripts submitted has varied between about 110 and 140 per year, so it’s a very competitive program, and a number of well-known poets had their first publication there. We have also evolved the annual Wollongong Poetry Workshop to run in conjunction with the publishing program.
I think the Wollongong Poetry Workshops will continue for quite a while yet, but I’m not so sure about the New Poets' Publishing Program. We will run the tenth series this year. That’s 60 poets we will have published since it started, and I am considering whether that might be an appropriate place to stop.
The mainstream program will continue, however, though I want to try to limit that to no more than about a dozen titles a year, to give me more time to promote the books more effectively. As I said earlier, there are no restrictions on the kind of poetry we take on. This year, for example, Dennis McDermott and Elizabeth Hodgson are editing an Aboriginal anthology, looking at poetry from the whole period of European settlement and before. It will be a major representative anthology. We’re also publishing a collection of the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachman’s poetry in English and German. Previously, we have published dual texts in Polish, Croation, Serbian, Japanese, Spanish and Chilean.
My idea is that the Press should aim to be as representative of contemporary Australian poetry as possible, that it should be eclectic in its tastes, and that, without sacrificing quality, it should aim to appeal to a broad spectrum of potential readers, many of whom simply do not know what poetry is being published around them. Many of them, having been frightened off poetry at school and university by an over-emphasis on technical and theoretical approaches, will only be attracted back to poetry if they can be brought to the recognition that poetry is, or should be, primarily about them: their dreams, their fears, their sense of themselves and the way they look at the world. Keats’ notion that poetry should fall on the reader like a remembrance is, I think, a very good one.
JK: The foundation of the Wollongong University School of Creative Writing had a dramatic effect on the acceptance of creative writing teaching and learning in Australia. What was your role in this? Do you have a specific pedagogical approach? What does the future hold for such programs in Australia? How do you compare them with similar programs elsewhere in the world?
RP: I guess the first thing to say here is that I am no longer in the Faculty of Creative Arts, and that the Writing Strand, and indeed the Faculty as a whole is heading in different directions from those I tried to promote as head of Creative Writing, so anything I say here is of historical value only.
The then School (now Faculty) of Creative Arts was set up at the beginning of the 1980s with Edward Cowie as its first Dean. I was in
London on study leave at the time, and I came home to find that it had been established without a writing strand. Over the next few years I lobbied for one. Professor Cowie agreed first to a minor strand of writing within the Bachelor of Creative Arts, and then to establishing Creative Writing as a fourth Major within the degree. I applied for, and was given, the position as Head of the Writing Strand.
Students in the Writing Major studied literature through the Faculty of Arts and, because the BCA was an interdisciplinary degree, they were also encouraged to take subjects in one of the other discipline areas, music, theatre, visual arts. Beyond that, the Writing Major was designed as a practical course. Students chose between courses in poetry, prose fiction, writing for theatre, film & tv, arts journalism and editing (which was based around the production of SCARP). The emphasis in the courses was on writing, workshopping and rewriting. It was also on the students finding and developing their own voice: we set out quite deliberately to avoid turning the students into clones of the lecturers, a problem not always avoided in such courses. There was always tension in assessment between the university’s insistence that the students be ranked in comparison with each other (the bell curve was the fashion in those days) and my conviction that the only meaningful comparison was with their own previous work.
The course was also planned to be outward-looking. I felt strongly that it wasn’t enough to teach such courses, we also had a responsibility to do what we could to promote the industry into which the students would graduate, in other words, to foster an interest in new writing in the broader community. We brought in a number of established writers for residencies of 9 weeks, among them Rodney Hall, John Forbes, Alex Buzo, Kirpal Singh and others. We had regular readings outside the university. We produced SCARP as a magazine open to writers Australia wide. We established Five Islands Press and the New Poets Program. Through the NSW Ministry for the Arts, we established the South Coast Writers Centre. I am pleased to say that, although the Faculty of Creative Arts has moved away from support for these initiatives, all continue to flourish, with the exception of SCARP which was closed down soon after I resigned as Head of Writing. In its place, we now have Blue Dog: Australian Poetry, sponsored by the Poetry Australia Foundation, which John Millett & I established in 2001.
As your question indicated, such courses have proliferated in Australia in the last decade or so, though there are many different models. Many are based within Literature/English courses. Some are single units or short sequences within BA or communication degrees. The American model of some undergraduate courses followed by an MFA has a lot to recommend it, but it is not much practised here. Some are strongly theoretical in their orientation.
There is much more that could be said about such courses than I have space for here. Can I just make three brief comments? From my own perspective, I think such courses can be very valuable even if few of the students taking them finish up as professional writers (whatever that may mean). Among other things, such students should be more open to new writing, should have a greater understanding of how writing works and should therefore have a deeper understanding and appreciation of literature. This stands in stark contrast to the many graduates who have been turned off poetry (in particular) by highly theorised cultural studies models. On the other hand, there are dangers. One I have alluded to already: the propensity of some lecturers in writing courses who act as though the only writing of value is the kind they themselves write, and therefore turn the students into clones, or turn them away. The other danger, I think, is that because writing has become a university industry, the only writing to be praised, to be privileged, is that produced by the universities, to the detriment of those writers who remain outside the system. The schism between “popular” or “accessible” writing on the one hand, and “academic” or “serious” writing on the other, could therefore be deepened, to the detriment of both. There is some anecdotal evidence from the States to suggest this is an issue there.
JK: Could you discuss the relationship between the teaching and writing of poetry? Do you find that it enhances and enriches your writing practice, and vice versa? Or does it close off creativity? And as a publisher and poetry activist, do you find that your writing time is compromised? How do you make use of creative space?
RP: On the one hand, there’s the problem of time. While I was teaching/running the strand/editing SCARP/ running the Press there wasn’t a lot of time for my own writing. Now I have retired from teaching, but the Press has expanded, and I’m running the Poetry Australia Foundation and managing Blue Dog, so there is still not a lot of time. I tend to do most of my writing late at night when I have the head-space and energy. I’ve never been particularly prolific, however, so I guess all my busyness gives me an excuse for not writing ... Perhaps, under other circumstances, I would have written more, but I’m reasonably content with the way it’s working at present. And on the other hand, teaching writing, workshopping your own and others’ poems, talking and thinking and reading about poets and poetry, I find, keeps the creating process ticking over. I seldom have to go looking for a poem; with a little scratching about and free writing, it presents itself, often as a result of one of the above activities.
JK: You seem to have a positive view of community in Australian poetry. Can you react to this statement and maybe talk about your work in creating a consistent, persistent readership for poets? Is a journal an essential part of the dialogue a publisher, editor, writer and reader have in the context of this community? Do you see advantages of print over web-based journals? Do they complement each other?
RP: I believe that the potential readership of poetry, the community, if you like, is much larger than the current one. It is that belief that has led to the formation of the Poetry Australia Foundation, to foster the reading, writing, reviewing and enjoyment of poetry. Two things mitigate against poetry reaching its potential readership. One is commercial. Since the big seven have largely withdrawn from poetry publishing, the retail marketing system no longer functions effectively for poetry. People can no longer go into their local bookstore and browse the poetry shelves as they still browse the fiction shelves, seeing what’s new, glancing at books that take their fancy, looking for favoured authors. With the honourable exception of a few independent bookstores, there are no bookshelves of poetry to browse. At the same time, publication of poems in the metropolitan dailies has shrunk, reviews of poetry have all but disappeared there, and apart from a tired old article about “the poetry wars”, previous little space is devoted to it. As a result, most people simply do not know what poetry is being written around them.
I think also that lots of people are turned off poetry by their experience of it in schools and universities. When I ask people what
started them writing, or why they continue to enjoy poetry, the answer very often is to do with a teacher they had who showed them what it had to offer. So there are good and effective teachers out there who know that poetry is, or should be, first of all a personal thing, something that shows the writer and then the reader a new way of seeing the world and their place in it, that opens their imagination to a sense of wonder, that opens them up to a full sense of the possibilities of language.
But there are also many teachers and lecturers who present poetry as a form of arcane knowledge, needing first of all an understanding of theories of cultural studies before it can be mastered. The NSW syllabus, for instance, presents a carefully selected set of Bruce Dawe’s poems as a study in consumerism, and the students spend their final year at school killing six poems. So many bright students I have known have walked away from high school or university declaring, “Thank God, I never have to open another book of poetry/work of Shakespeare’s/ serious novel again!” Such students have been impoverished by their education, and among the things they have lost is an openness to what poetry has to offer.
The Poetry Australia Foundation was set up to look at ways of addressing these issues, and if people would like to contact me, I’d be happy to give them details of the projects and plans we have. Among the things, though, that I would like people to recognise is that there isn’t one monolithic Poetry, but many poetries, each with their own internal logic, each with their own readership. Often there are considerable overlaps between them, of course, but sometimes, sadly, there is not. The strong tradition of bush balladry, for example, is largely cut off from the mainstream, to the detriment of both. And by the same token, there are many, and growing, ways of presenting poetry: books and magazines certainly, but also performances, postcards and posters, the web…we lose some of the richness and some of the potential if we turn our back on any of these, though we will, of course, have our own preferences among them. The real disservice is done, I think, when we proclaim our preferences as the only legitimate form.
JK: Do you think there is a strong sense of internationalism in Australian poetry?
RP: If you mean, are Australian poets influenced by what’s being written overseas, I think the answer is yes, but probably less so than it was with the class of ‘68. I’d also like to think that there’s a greater openness to poetries from outside the English-speaking world, to the South Americans, from the Indian sub-continent and Asia generally. Unfortunately, that tends to be a minority interest, cordoned off from the “mainstream”.
I think in fact that there’s still a lot of parochialism in poetry. It affects, not only our attitude to overseas poets, but even poets within Australia. Poets from WA, I’m thinking particularly of Marcella Polain, Mark Reid and others, don’t have the audience they deserve in the eastern states. Queenslanders feel similarly neglected by the southern states and so on. So we shouldn’t be surprised to find that it’s difficult for Australian poets to make much of an impact overseas. And on the other hand, one of the reasons that Poetry Australia closed down in the mid-nineties was the Literature Board's refusal to support a magazine that was publishing a lot of poetry from overseas writers.
JK: What are you reading now? Could you discuss any forthcoming work?
RP: I’ve just finished Ken Inglis’ The Stuart Case and Richard Evans’ Telling Lies About Hitler. Given the pressure of time, though, I tend to dip into books, rather than read them. At present I’m dipping into Peter Conrad’s Modern Places, Modern Times, Bob Carr’s Thoughtlines, Robert Hughes Nothing If Not Critical and Fleur Adcock’s Poems 1960-2000.
As I said earlier, my own writing tends to be fairly spasmodic; if I manage a poem I’m happy with every couple of months, I’m satisfied, so my next collection is probably a year or two away yet ...
About the Poet Ron Pretty
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Ron Pretty has been publishing his poetry for more than 30 years. He has published four books of poetry, the most recent being Of the Stone: New and Selected Poems published in 2000. His book on the writing of poetry, Creating Poetry, was first published by Edward Arnold and was reissued this year in a revised edition. He was editor of the literary/arts magazine Scarp from 1984 until its demise in 1999. He has taught writing in schools, universities and community groups throughout Australia and in the US, England and Austria. From 1983 until he took early retirement in 1998 he was head of writing in the Faculty of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong. He is the director of Five Islands Press which has published over 130 books of contemporary Australian poetry. With John Millett, he has set up the Poetry Australia Foundation, a non-profit organisation promoting the writing, reading, reviewing and teaching of poetry in this country. The first issue of Blue Dog: Australian Poetry, sponsored by the Poetry Australia Foundation, will be launched in May this year. He was awarded the 2001 NSW Premier's Special Award for Services to Australian Literature. |
[Above] Photo of Ron Pretty by Chris Verheyden, 1998.
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Thylazine No.4 (September, 2001) |
